21,169 research outputs found

    Fighting Authorship Linkability with Crowdsourcing

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    Massive amounts of contributed content -- including traditional literature, blogs, music, videos, reviews and tweets -- are available on the Internet today, with authors numbering in many millions. Textual information, such as product or service reviews, is an important and increasingly popular type of content that is being used as a foundation of many trendy community-based reviewing sites, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp. Some recent results have shown that, due partly to their specialized/topical nature, sets of reviews authored by the same person are readily linkable based on simple stylometric features. In practice, this means that individuals who author more than a few reviews under different accounts (whether within one site or across multiple sites) can be linked, which represents a significant loss of privacy. In this paper, we start by showing that the problem is actually worse than previously believed. We then explore ways to mitigate authorship linkability in community-based reviewing. We first attempt to harness the global power of crowdsourcing by engaging random strangers into the process of re-writing reviews. As our empirical results (obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk) clearly demonstrate, crowdsourcing yields impressively sensible reviews that reflect sufficiently different stylometric characteristics such that prior stylometric linkability techniques become largely ineffective. We also consider using machine translation to automatically re-write reviews. Contrary to what was previously believed, our results show that translation decreases authorship linkability as the number of intermediate languages grows. Finally, we explore the combination of crowdsourcing and machine translation and report on the results

    English Bards and Unknown Reviewers: a Stylometric Analysis of Thomas Moore and the Christabel Review

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    Fraught relations between authors and critics are a commonplace of literary history. The particular case that we discuss in this article, a negative review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel (1816), has an additional point of interest beyond the usual mixture of amusement and resentment that surrounds a critical rebuke: the authorship of the review remains, to this day, uncertain. The purpose of this article is to investigate the possible candidacy of Thomas Moore as the author of the provocative review. It seeks to solve a puzzle of almost two hundred years, and in the process clear a valuable scholarly path in Irish Studies, Romanticism, and in our understanding of Moore's role in a prominent literary controversy of the age

    Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity

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    Copyright lawyers talk and write a lot about the uncertainties of fair use and the deterrent effects of a clearance culture on publishers, teachers, filmmakers, and the like, but know less about the choices people make about copyright on a daily basis, especially when they are not working. Here, Tushnet examines one subcultural group that engages in a variety of practices, from pure copying and distribution of others\u27 works to creation of new stories, art, and audiovisual works: the media-fan community. Among other things, she discusses some differences between fair use and fan practices, focused around attribution as an alternative to veto rights over uses of copyrighted works

    The Paroxetine 352 Bipolar Study Revisited: Deconstruction of Corporate and Academic Misconduct

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    Medical ghostwriting is the practice in which pharmaceutical companies engage an outside writer to draft a manuscript submitted for publication in the names of “honorary authors,” typically academic key opinion leaders. Using newly-posted documents from paroxetine litigation, we show how the use of ghostwriters and key opinion leaders contributed to the publication of a medical journal article containing manipulated outcome data to favor the proprietary medication. The article was ghostwritten and managed by SmithKline Beecham, now GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Scientific Therapeutics Information, Inc. without acknowledging their contribution in the published article. The named authors with financial ties to GSK, had little or no direct involvement in the paroxetine 352 bipolar trial results and most had not reviewed any of the manuscript drafts. The manuscript was originally rejected by peer review; however, its ultimate acceptance to the American Journal of Psychiatry was facilitated by the journal editor who also had financial ties to GSK. Thus, GSK was able to take an under-powered and non-informative trial with negative results and present it as a positive marketing vehicle for off-label promotion of paroxetine for bipolar depression. In addition to the commercial spin of paroxetine efficacy, important protocol-designated safety data were unreported that may have shown paroxetine to produce potentially harmful adverse events
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